


Take Me Down The Line

by mortaltemples



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Discussions of abuse, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Canon, discussions of trauma and violence, the adventure continues etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-09
Updated: 2016-01-09
Packaged: 2018-05-12 19:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5677837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortaltemples/pseuds/mortaltemples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Rhys took a deep breath.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“I just think that...ever since this whole thing started, we’ve been messing with things too big for us. And not just you and me, but all of us, as a species. We pretty much rocked up in space, found a vault and were like ‘Oh, awesome, a cache of weird alien tech, don’t mind if I do’ and left it at that. I’m pretty sure there’s, like, a billion ancient Earth myths about why that’s an utterly terrible idea.”</i></p><p>  <i>“Yeah, but money.” Fiona grinned.</i></p><p> </p><p>The Vault of the Traveller dumped Rhys and Fiona on a strange forest planet. They cope with this. Barely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Me Down The Line

**Author's Note:**

> I've fallen in love with the Borderlands universe. Send help pls.

The planet Rhys had landed on with Fiona was certainly a step up from Pandora in terms of its look. A gorgeous forest that seemed to go on forever, the trees were purple and enormous. Rhys’ experience with nature was fairly minimal, yet he’d be happy to own up to the fact that he couldn’t name a single plant on this planet. And, as a bonus, there were slightly less things that could kill you. So far.

They had even discovered fruit - ones that tasted sweet and somehow managed to energise them for a whole day. Rhys made a note of its size, shape and colour, thinking maybe that’s what Atlas could do - clone fruit. Have a company be productive, for a change. Add something new to Pandora.

Shit, no. That was a _terrible_ idea. The fruit would probably attract threshers or something.

Everything taken into consideration, it was definitely an improvement as far as he was concerned.

In fact, Rhys would have gone so far as to say that the Vault had done him a real solid by sending him here if it weren’t for the fact that he had, you know, a company to run.

And also to figure out what it’s going to be.

In the three days since arriving on...wherever they were, Fiona had taken to amusing herself by suggesting various potential paths for Atlas. _Rhyslas_ , as she had called it. _You should make it distinctive_.

 Weapons? No.

Resource acquisition? Absolutely not.

Rhys supposed it made sense that it was easier for him to tell what the company should never become, rather than what it needs to be.

Nevertheless, the question was valid, and it was one that had been playing on his mind since before entering the vault.

Vault of the Traveller. Well, of course.

Fiona had been unusually quiet, leaving him to his thoughts for the past hour. All Rhys could think was that she was still going over the events of the night before. He’d woken her up with his screaming at thin air. Not his finest moment. She had insisted that she understood, he was dealing with shit, trauma happens. But she wasn’t there in those last few hours with Jack. The threats, Rhys pretending to ignore him. Destroying his body just to claw it back for himself.

_Therapy_ . As soon as they got back. Definite requirement.

“Are you going to use Atlas to build an army of creepy robots?” Fiona said suddenly. 

“Yeah, I can safely say that robot army is off the cards.” Rhys retorted. Fiona shrugged.

“Just making sure.”

With that, they fell into silence once again. Rhys stuck his hands in his pockets.

“I feel like Atlas is covered ground at this point. I’d be more interested in you talking about vault hunting.” He said.

“There’s not much to say.”

Rhys’ eyes widened in delight and he felt his grin growing on his face as he imagined the potential fuck-ups that caused Fiona to be so evasive.

“And don’t get excited. I know that look. It’s just, well, sometimes I doubt.” She clarified. Rhys blinked in surprise.

“When we were in the vault, you were all set for your new, _slightly_ more legal career.” He reminded her.

“I know that. It’s just, I’ve been feeling...I don’t know. That I’m _meant_ to do this.”

Rhys blinked. “Oh, well. That’s terrible. You’re absolutely right.”

“No, it’s not. It’s fucking _weird_. I’d have to be stupid to trust that.” Fiona grumbled. Of all things Rhys had been expecting.

“So, according to you, getting decent career advice is the height of weirdness?” He said. Fiona shrugged and crinkled her nose. Over the course of their friendship, Rhys had, despite his protests to the contrary, learned to trust Fiona’s instincts - if she felt something was off, it probably meant someone was about to start shooting.

“On the one hand, I’m good at it, or at least I could be. I don’t think it’s vain to admit to that much.” She said, hopping from stone to stone over a small stream and further down the path. Rhys nodded in agreement.

“In your defense, you’re one of, like, three or four people to have ever actually been inside a vault.” He paused for a second. “Okay, seven people, at the very most.” Fiona grinned dryly at him.

“Athena thinks I’ve got lots of potential. Which, you know, can only be a good thing.” She said. “But on the other hand, there’s something definitely suspect about the whole deal. I mean, Felix, for starters. Everything surrounding the vault hunting - its suggestion to me, my training. It’s all been decided _for_ me.” Fiona paused briefly, taking a moment to dig a stone out of her shoe. “I guess it all just. Makes me a little bit uncomfortable, you know?”

There was a long silence at that. They looked around them. This appeared to be a slightly less strange part of a forest. There was actual greenery, even patches of something that looked pretty close to grass. Progress. Always important to bear that in mind.

“The trees to the left look slightly less intimidating.” He told Fiona. She nodded and they headed down that path. For a few minutes, they walked in silence, just focussing on the path in front of them.

“You could always come work for me.” Rhys said, finally. Fiona snorted. “Okay, so I don’t know what Atlas is, and I don’t really know what kind of job you could have. But think about it, just in case, you know, neither a life of crime, nor an incredibly glamorous but ultimately lonely and short lived life of vault hunting takes your fancy.”

Fiona raised her eyebrow. “Lonely and short lived? Thanks.”

“Well, am I wrong?” Rhys said. She didn’t have to answer that. He reckoned he knew the real reason why Fiona was reluctant to take up vault hunting on a permanent basis.

“You don’t have to, you know.” He said softly. She stopped walking and looked up at him. “Just because you’re good at this one thing, doesn’t mean it suits you. There’s more to consider than ‘Am I talented at this?’ If that were the only thing to be valued, I’d make Atlas into a crew of professional hackers.”

“Okay, that’s a fair point.” Fiona conceded as she began walking once more. Rhys took a deep breath.

“Look, the way I see it, we have the same problem - we found a vault, lived through all that we lived through, and now we have no idea what to do next. How to top it. And, look, about this next part, don’t tell anyone I said this, okay? I have audio evidence of you singing on the toilet in the caravan and I’m not afraid to use it. But maybe we don’t have to top it. Maybe it’s okay if we want to, you know, put ourselves first.”

Fiona gave him what could only be described as a ‘look’.

“Yeah. Cheesy, but I’m right, and you know it.” He said smugly. Fiona smirked at him, which Rhys knew was the closest she would ever get to ceding the point.

Fiona walked ahead of him, pushing through the foliage that blocked their path. Finally, the huge trees parted a little bit, the forest becoming slightly less dense, to reveal nothing less than...a giant slab of concrete on the horizon.

_Great_ .

“DAHL. Figures. Functional, sure, but ugly as a bullymong’s ass.”

 ****

Fiona dusted off her hat. Bits of leaves, and the forest floor had managed to stick to it. She could still see the sun peeking through the strange lilac trees. They’d worked out that it meant that they should have about half an hour left. Not much point trying to reach the DAHL facility tonight, every time they spotted it, it just seemed further away.

Rhys was on log-acquiring slash area-scouting duty. The deal was, if there was any danger, he would scream, and then they would run and pray that they went in vaguely the same direction.

They’d only had to use their emergency system once in the week that they’d been...wherever they were. Man-sized bugs were never a good thing.

Rhys came through the foliage to her right, his utterly ridiculous shoes being the first thing she saw.

“Do you ever think about just how _weird_ Pandora is?” He said. About twenty large twigs fell out of his arms and onto the jungle floor.

“And just what am I meant to do with these?” Fiona said, picking one up and giving Rhys a poke with the pointy end.

“I don’t know! Make a fire! Make it into a shelter! However this works.” He said, arms flailing, and eyebrows furrowing.

“Wow. How the hell did you survive on Pandora before Loader Bot found you?” She said.

“I was inside! In something resembling civilisation! With underfloor heating and network access, like a normal person.” He retorted. Fiona could only sigh deeply. The act had been perfected between them for a while - the Pandoran hick and the pampered corporate brat. It became easy after a while to forget that it wasn’t _entirely_ an act.

“God, you’re ridiculous sometimes.” She said. “And to answer your original question, I have no idea what you mean.” Rhys made. Well, Fiona supposed he made a sound somewhere around a groan. Came out more like a whine, though.

“Come on! You must have noticed it! Your homeworld has no _cities_ , not real ones at any rate, and Sanctuary _definitely_ doesn’t count as a real place. You have no governments, no real infrastructure. Just potential causes of death - over and over and over. I mean. What’s up with that?” He said, finally coming to a slump beside her.

“Isn’t that something you could have asked Jack?” Fiona replied sharply, without even thinking. Rhys flinched. _Shit_.

“Rhys, I’m so sorry.”

“Please just. Don’t tread on eggshells around me. Not you.” He said and tried to laugh. Fiona shook her head. Giving each other shit is fine, she could never apologise for that, but after hearing his side of the story...there are some lines you just don’t cross with friends.

“All I meant was...well, he -”

“Destroyed Pandora so he might have known more about what it was like before?” Rhys said wryly. Fiona nodded. “I probably could have asked him, I know. But to be honest, I was a bit busy trying to figure out whether I could believe a single word that came out of his lying, manipulative mouth. And, well, I guess we both know the ultimate answer to that one.”

It was Fiona’s turn to flinch now.

“Rhys, I really _am_ sorry for how I reacted, when you told us about Jack being inside your head. I didn’t -” He held up a hand. She got it - they sucked as friends before. Always looking for a leg up, never truly trusting each other. As if either of them could have reacted to their circumstances any differently. Now, however, the past was best left to kiss its own ass.

Rhys took a deep breath.

“I just think that...ever since this whole thing started, we’ve been messing with things too big for us. And not just you and me, but all of us, as a species. We pretty much rocked up in space, found a vault and were like ‘Oh, awesome, a cache of weird alien tech, don’t mind if I do’ and left it at that. I’m pretty sure there’s, like, a billion ancient Earth myths about why that’s an utterly  _terrible_ idea.”

“Yeah, but money.” Fiona grinned.

“Ding dong, we have a winner, and her name is Miss Fiona! Con artist from the bellend of Pandora!” Rhys mimicked the roar of a crowd for a second.

“Don’t really know if I’d ever call this winning, though.” She said, wryly. Rhys nodded back at her, his smile _almost_ reaching his eyes.

“Exactly.” Rhys picked up a handful of twigs and placed them in a circle. Next, he started piling twigs on top of each other, until it formed a neat little pile. Fiona tugged at his sleeve as she stood up.

“So you’re thinking of making Atlas into some kind of charity, then? Because, I’ve got to say - never saw that one coming from you.” She said, walking them back a safe distance.

“You know, you’re hilarious. Simply hilarious. Here I am, trying to be vaguely sensible by wildly saying ‘Hey maybe we shouldn’t poke at things before we understand what the hell they are', and you’re making me into some kind of freak show.” Rhys’ hands went to his ears just in time, shielding himself from the worst of the release of Fiona’s incendiary bullet onto the pile of twigs that now formed a gentle fire.

“Not a freak show, just boring. I mean, come on! Gorgeous vaults, weird technology, death-defying stunts! Where’s your sense of adventure?” She said, grinning. Rhys rolled his eyes.

“You know what, I _think_ I might have lost it somewhere between stealing ten million big ones and ripping out my own eye with my bare hand.”

“Yeah, fair enough. That’d do it.”

“Thanks.”

****

Rhys grimaced as he plucked a small bug from the third button on his shirt. The jacket had been discarded five days ago after an incident involving something resembling a jaguar and a poorly timed water fight with his companion.

Maybe it was because he was distracted, but the first indication Rhys had that anything was wrong was seeing, for a single moment, a blur out of the corner of his eye. The barest flicker of a creature before it disappeared again. He didn’t even have time to call out to Fiona before he heard a screech. A large winged reptile jumped at them from behind the bushes.

Rhys had barely registered the attack before Fiona’s pistol appeared and put the animal down. It fell to the floor with a thump.

_Stalker_ , he remembered distantly. That was its name - they had them on Pandora as well.

Fiona pushed her pistol back into her sleeve and rolled her shoulders, but Rhys barely registered her movements. He stared at the bullet hole between the stalker’s eyes and tried to breathe.

_Water in my lungs. I’m nowhere near the ocean but I have water in my lungs._ That was the only semi-coherent thought in his head. Each attempt at a breath caught in his throat as he remembered the flicker out the corner of his eye. Just for an instant, it had been a year ago.

_I will hide at the back of your head and when you least expect it…_

Rhys could hear the venom in Jack’s voice even from a year and a planet’s distance away. Then his brain just. Stopped. It just stopped. He couldn’t feel his legs, register thoughts or even breathe. Jack was _there_ , he was whispering in his ear, he was the hand on -

_No_ , he wasn’t, Rhys realised. Because he could feel it. Someone’s fingers squeezing his shoulder, a person breathing next to him.

“Hey, Rhys.” he heard faintly. The voice was almost gentle compared to his brain. “Are you...what’s going on?”

_Fiona_ , he realised. He was on a strange planet and he was with Fiona. Jack was dead. He’d seen to it himself, had the new eye colour to prove it. Fiona furrowed her brow but said nothing, just kept her hand squeezing his shoulder gently.

“You okay?” She asked after a while. Rhys nodded breathlessly. As always, it was easier to lie than to deal with reality, and if anyone was going to understand that, it would be the woman standing next to him. She smiled gently, more out of reassurance, rather than any actual mirth. She led him slowly to a few metres down from the fallen stalker and sat them both on the ground.

“We don’t know where we are, or how long we’re going to be here for. You _need_ to tell me what’s going on, Rhys.” She said seriously. Rhys nodded again. He took a deep breath that came easier than before and focused his attention on his fingers, pressed to the ground, digging into the soil. It felt cool and soft beneath his fingertips, gently crumbling dirt as it fell through his fingers like a sieve.

“I thought I was over it.” He began hoarsely. “I thought that, by dealing with the vault, I’d dealt with...well, whatever shit was left over from…” He paused. “Helios.”

Fiona said nothing, simply crossed her legs quietly and waited for him to continue.

“I hadn’t thought, until I was in Jack’s office, what it meant to have someone else living inside my head. All the implications of it. And worse, what it meant to have _Jack_ , of all people, with his suggestions and trying to get me to walk into each and every potential fucking _death trap_.” Rhys had to pause, running his cybernetic hand through his hair briefly.

“When I rejected his offer to run Hyperion,” He continued, “Jack...well, I guess you could say he took the kid gloves off. And then there were wires and contraptions and he tried to take over my _body_ .” Rhys said. Fiona opened her mouth as though to speak, but quickly closed it again. “I nearly died about twenty times in the space of five minutes and I have to say, it _sucked_.”

There was a long pause at that. Rhys continued to breathe, slowly, in through his nose and out again through his mouth. It was something he’d often seen Yvette do when particularly stressed, it always seemed to help her out.

“I get nightmares.” Fiona said finally. “Ones where I lost Felix’s pocketwatch, or where Sascha never made it out of the Traveller at all. Ones where I couldn’t find an escape pod on Helios and ended up crashing with everyone else. They always feel so _real_. Living it once was bad enough, you know?”

Rhys nodded in agreement and returned to picking at the soil.

“When you get nightmares,” He said without looking up, “you should wake me.” Fiona startled at that and looked and him, Rhys continued trying to avoid her gaze. “Look, don’t be weird about it, but nightmares are just. Fucking awful, and _come on_ , it’d be ridiculous for us to deny being friends at this point.” He finally looked up at her. “Over this, more than anything, I’ve got your back, Fiona.”

They looked at each other in silence for a long moment. Until, finally, Fiona couldn’t take it anymore.

She snorted with laughter.

“That was beautiful. Are we married now?” She said fondly and nudged him with her shoulder.

“I hate you. So much.”

****

They finally reached the DAHL building another week later. They got in through the window, of all things.

“Whatever Atlas does,” Fiona said as she brushed off the dirt on her trousers, “You _have_ to make sure to have tighter security than that.”

Rhys nodded in agreement. They were in a large atrium - it still looked just as grey and dreary as the outside did, but at least there were windows. Two, to be precise, one on each side of the large double doors that failed to budge even for Fiona’s very best lockpicking attempts. And no plants. That was kind of a relief. After a while, Fiona had to agree with Rhys, nature has had its day. Nevertheless, the contrast with the vibrant outside world couldn’t be clearer. Nature’s beauty and man’s...big grey slab of concrete, apparently.

The building was completely deserted. No indications whatsoever that there was anyone working, living or even squatting here.

“Come on, let’s find a power source so we can boot up that computer over there and figure out where the hell we are.” Rhys said.

They picked a corridor on the North side of the room and followed that, until they reached a room full of bunk beds.

A barracks.

“The beds aren’t made.” Fiona said curiously. They clearly hadn’t been slept in for a long while, yet Fiona fixated on that one tiny aspect of the room. The beds had not been made.

Rhys looked around, but said nothing, eventually progressing into the next room - a large canteen, with empty trays dotted around the room, left on the tables as though the users had finished every last crumb on their plate and carelessly left them behind.

_Just like the unmade beds_ , Fiona thought with a shudder.

“There’s not a single speck of life in this place.” Rhys muttered. No colour, no food or drink. Just grey trays on grey tables.  “I mean, DAHL are drones, but this is bad even for them.” He said smugly.

Fiona quickly found the kitchen and called Rhys over to her when she saw a fuse box in the corner of the room. He rearranged the wires and eventually, the distinctive sound of power running through long dormant cables came through.

“Come on, let’s go see if that computer’s working.” Fiona said and they walked back to the atrium.

Rhys fiddled with the computer on the wall for a moment as Fiona tapped her foot on the ground. Once they had a location, or even a planet name, they could start finding their way out and back home.

She thought of Sascha, and their deal to find somewhere nice to spend her birthday this year. An actual _break_ , for the both of them. It was needed.

“Okay, I am in.” Rhys said finally. Fiona peered over his shoulder. “The bad news is that I can’t find any actual name for the planet in DAHL’s records. Either they thought it was so obvious it didn’t need saying, or they were idiots. Probably the latter.”

_You can take the nerd out of Hyperion_ , Fiona thought wryly.

“In further bad news, looks like weird stuff was being done here. There’s a ton of deleted records, erased camera footage, that kind of thing.” He said. Fiona rolled her eyes.

“So this has all been useless, then?” She asked. Rhys shook his head.

“They’ve got storage lockers. We can loot ‘em for supplies.” He grinned. Fiona clapped him on the back.

“I’m so proud.”

They made their way down the corridor on the east side of the atrium, pausing occasionally to marvel at the utter lack of architecture.

_Pandora may be a planet-sized death trap_ , Fiona thought,  _but at least there’s stuff to look at_ .

Rhys led her into a small room that contained some large lockers, these were promptly raided by the pair for anything valuable. Money, weapons, magazines dating back thirty years. They could hardly return from plundering a vault empty handed.

As Fiona shoved the last bits of cash in her pockets, she noticed Rhys squinting at a panel on the opposite wall.

“That’s a secret door.” He said, pointing. Fiona shook her head.

“No one in real life would _ever_ both -”

She didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence before Rhys opened it to reveal another corridor.

“Weird shit is your area of expertise, right, Possible Vault Hunter?” He said with a smirk. Fiona grinned.

“Stand back.”

She led him down the corridor and into a large room that resembled the atrium. The only bit of decoration was a chest-height pillar in the middle of the room. Fiona stopped to stare at it, something felt not quite right about the room. She thought again of the deserted barracks, the empty canteen trays left on the table. The unmade beds. Rhys came to stand beside her, his own eyes fixed on the pillar as well.

“Two hundred credits says it’s another vault key.” Fiona muttered to him. Rhys laughed.

“If it is, please excuse me if I just start crying.”

Fiona snorted and walked slowly towards the pillar. It looked completely ordinary - square and dull and grey, just like everything else in this building. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that it felt _off_.

She touched it lightly with one finger. Nothing happened.

This time, she placed her whole hand on top of the pillar.

Nothing.

She whacked it with her palm.

_Ouch_ , but still nothing.

Fiona heard Rhys sigh loudly from the other side of the room.

“Need some help?” He called and began to walk over.

“Nope! I’ve got it.” Fiona insisted. She was the Possible Vault Hunter, dammit.

“Yeah, because your _magic touch_ is really making this baby light up the sky.” He said with a smirk and put his hand next to hers on the pillar.

The whole room lit up, exploding into colour and light and sound. It was like catching the sun’s rays through a shard of glass. Both Fiona and Rhys stepped backwards, covering their eyes from the sudden bursts of colour.

Finally, the light dimmed, leaving them exactly where they had been standing before, the room and the pillar looking exactly the same as it had before the light, save for a large purple crystal sitting on top of it.

It seemed to emit a faint buzz, and it changed colour to a blinding silver when Fiona’s fingers brushed it.

Rhys opened his mouth, closed it again.

“I was right.” Fiona said smugly.

“Son of a _bitch_.”


End file.
